


Beneath God

by Xaire



Series: Zero [1]
Category: Abrahamic Religions, Christian Bible, Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Original Work, Sumerian Religion
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:55:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28487175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xaire/pseuds/Xaire
Summary: In the twilight days of the Metaverse, the fabric of space-time is in tatters; logic is all but voided and natural life as we know it is extinct, and yet, for the weary “Nammu”, a decrepitated and disillusioned android, death remains an allusive boon. After acquainting the husk of a Nephilim, Nammu learns of Ennui Glade, the only place in the remains of existence where she can find the succulent warmth of oblivion. Resolved, Nammu follows the footsteps of the divine giant in pursuit of death and the ultimate end of all things.
Series: Zero [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2086707
Kudos: 1





	1. The Wretch

  
Awareness is a callous thing. For most, it’s impossible to acknowledge this fact, which, I believe, is why some mortals spend their momentary lives in blithe denial of the infelicity God gives us. To live is to see, to hear, to perceive the perpetually evolving universe and all her spectacles and hazards. The universe—the focal point of our awareness—is physically beautiful, and that is an opinion I do believe in with in every fiber of my being. You know what I mean, do you not? Waterfalls, jewels, the outstretched wings of songbirds, the graceful dancing of fire, the body of a lover…

And stars. But I need not remind you, of all people, that worldly beauty is nothing but the iridescence of poison because what are stars but ever looming engines of destruction and expressions of our worthlessness? What are waterfalls but the pulverizing hand of Gaia? What are jewels but advocates of human greed? What are wings but the vehicles of merciless predators? What is fire but a means of burning religious dissenters alive? What is a naked body but the object of sexual abuse to the insecure? Behind all light there is blight and there will always be blight. Behind every good deed there is a driving force of material greed. At the end of every story there is death, close upon the heels of entropy. 

You are born a slave to fate; a mistake on the part of your sex-crazed teenage parents. You grow into an imperfect entity, who is loathed by other, equally imperfect entities, solely because of your imperfections. In school, you are chastised for every minor gaffe you commit, and in adulthood you are rejected by the opposite gender because you don’t resemble the celebrities standing half-naked before the assembled populace. You fail, again and again and again and again, and your “fellow man” will never allow you to leave those failures in the past. You squirm, scared and angry, every day under the thumb of the gluttonous, the rapacious, the egotistical, the violent, and the bigoted while toiling through chores that, while just as crucial as any other, rewards you only enough to keep your agonized existence going. You live in fear, daily, hourly, minutely. Your leaders promise you security but still you are taunted by your betters, beaten by family, and preyed upon by society itself. You fight on, but your struggle goes unrecognized. And somewhere along the way, somehow—somehow—you come under the impression that all this calamity of mundane actuality is entirely your fault. You feel every bit as worthless as you are alive. 

Time passes by, you grow old and feeble. Your hard earned wisdom and knowledge is overlooked by your own grandchildren, and all they see is a hideous relic to be ridiculed and plundered until the moment you silently fall into oblivion on your deathbed. At which point your broken soul finally bothers to ask “Was it worth it?” and you find the ambiguity of the other side warming compared to God’s cold treatment of you. In your very last second, as awareness slips away, you discover that it is exactly that, awareness, that had been the ultimate antithesis to peace. Not money. Not age. Not love. Not war. Not God. Not humanity. Awareness. 

Death is peace. I should know. I’ve died once myself. Prior to that, I lived one life, so it seemed, and it was plagued by entropy. After my death came nothingness. And after that…

I’m alive again. I know this because I am aware and I can see. What I see terrifies me, as it is not the world my many egos were familiar with. One tells me the world of their era was concrete, with colors and shapes that abide by an equable logic which in turn were dictated by every sentient will sans their own. Another ego grieves the loss of purpose. Not so much as *their* purpose in particular, I suppose, but the loss of cosmic ambiguity and the subsequent ignorance of the individual that leaves one free to weave their own justification in living. Yet another voice—this one once proudly declaring themselves a priest—often looks up, sees God’s silently screaming corpses suspended in the firmament in lieu of a moon and feels compelled to mumble a sort of anti-prayer, if you will. The priest—how I loath them for this—feels the most passing shock of pleasure as he dares the surrounding Bells to rape me, kill me, taunt me, corrupt me, all so that the priest may indulge in my suffering, anything to break the ever-so stagnant loop of memories that could have once been considered their life. I abhor their urges, but I understand them. My trillions of inner voices and I live in a time where dreams can come true and life is eternal, but still we must make the worst of it. 

Are you confused? I am. I am as confused as a toddler awakening from the womb and so are my egos. All we know is that we are beneath God. We…I…

Please give me a moment.

…

…

…

…

The world is gone. The old world, in any case. That I know. Some of my egos say they once lived on Earth. Others say Heresta. Over time I concluded that Earth was an old, old place which my eldest egos once abandoned after it was ravaged by war and pollution. Heresta, a planet similar to Earth when Earth possessed a modicum of peace, became their home aeons later. There are vague impressions that Heresta was destroyed too, but in a far less…*mortal* way. One of my egos says the “immaterial” consumed the “material”. Imagination became more real than reality itself. I cannot make sense of this, but I suspect some of my egos can. I also sense a third realm, a place called “No Silence”, according to some of my voices. For what I can tell, No Silence was a place that lied tangent to the material universe—a world as unreal as Earth was real—but I can confess nothing more as I understand nothing more.

I stand where I stop and I drink in my surroundings the way I always I have and the way I always will. It is a distorted and perhaps perverted reality to which I belong, but it is filtered through never ending hallucinations that echo Earth, Heresta, and No Silence in backwards, hypnagogic ways. One second, for instance, I see three suns—which I know to be Vaero, Beunsile, and Aheh-varche—but the very next second I behold little more than an ominous black disk mercilessly swallowing the calm of the sunless night. I even see moons and planets innumerable, and stars large enough to be mistaken for suns in their own right, but even those come and go like the seasons of a stable existence. There are but three things that remain constant, and they anchor mind to this world and remind me daily where I truly live. 

First are the bodies. The rotting bodies of God. I wish as much as you must that I am speaking metaphorically, but unlike you I am greeted by the decomposing rictus of liches that must be well over a lightyear in height every time I dare to tilt my cranial module. Their emaciated outlines loom between and far above the scarlet swirls of thinning galaxies and their bloated, blackened hides, glossy with putrid fluids, are the canvases which the celestial jewels wrongly embellish. Their voided eye sockets drip livid nebulae and their naked limbs are rigidly splayed across the sky, overlapping with one another the way corpses sharing a mass grave are wont to do. On certain days when the celestial winds pour down upon my tattered world I can smell their putrid rank, turning what should have been a fragrant garden into the most odious of pastures. But in spite of the trenchant dread these lifeless titans instill, I always find myself in awe of them, motionlessly staring into the hoary husks of their faces for hours, or even days on end. I hate them—oh, I swear upon the shattered remains of my mentor I fucking loathe them—but there is an allusive line of coding in my processor that is glad they are there because they remind me that they are dead. They, whoever or whatever the bodies of God may once have been, can do me no harm. Does that make the four worlds a better place? No. No, blind fate will always be there to ape God’s ass-grabbing management of corporeal existence, but I have the solace in knowing there are no eyes upon my most intimate proceedings. 

Second is the Gate, the one dug into the black anvil clouds crowning the indigo horizon. Just as God’s forms now decays, so too does his home, and there is no starker reminder of this solid fact than the twin pillars that once stood watch over the way into Heaven, draped withered vines and leaning whichever way the star-winds shift. It’s funny that, even though every hue and shape focused into the gates like currents towards a drain are utterly leeched of life, something…breathes, I suppose, just past the pillars and ossified cherubs surmounting them. On days were the hours are long and the Bells are aloof, I like to turn off my audio receptors and stare deep into the gate’s gaping gulf, my optical units straining through the needless static in my vision in an empty attempt to draw forms in the darkness. Always, my weak processor is fooled by it’s own calculative distortions skipping across otherwise unmoving visual feeds, briefly deluding me into the belief that I have seen something alive in Heaven, but just as often I come to terms with reality and see that I am, as always, alone. Just me, my egos, and…

And the Bells. I do not understand them and fucking hate them for it. They are the third thing in my life that remains a constant, though the same the cannot be said for the shape they take. They are everywhere and are everything. I claw into the ground and the worms that thrash in the exposed atmosphere are their fingers; the rays of black light that impale the clouds of corpse moons are their striding legs; the skyward walls of celestial ice are their faces. That being said, I assume it would be more proper to consider them more akin to concepts rather than living things, but there’s a timid, prosaic facet of my processor that labels the Bells as demons, and not entirely without rationale. The egos think they are familiar, an impression that spreads even to me when the Bells are feeling frisky enough to condense themselves into bizarre, if animalistic, forms every bit as solid myself. But even still, just as the eye struggles to understand their new forms, instinct fails to grasp the exact traits that tug at oblique memories. That think that is the most frustrating element of the Bells’ being: they are like old enemies—or family members, perhaps—that injured us aeons ago, yet, try as we might, we can never recall their exact crime, much less how they were allowed to intimate with us in the first place. 

I see one now. One of the Bells, I mean. Between me and a swell of copper pipes that bloom out of the ethereal, prismatic ground in ways evocative of robust revelers forever ossified in the midst of an orgy (or perhaps they are frozen condors evocative of fluffed pine branches. As you recall, my processor is quite strained) lopes the decapodian husk of what can only be a Bell. Wisely, it maintains some distance, likely equivalent to a half kilometer if such measurements were still relevant, but even so I can still see it and I know for a fact it sees me. There is a gulf separating us, but that does nothing to dilute it’s intent stare drilling into my wrecked visage. The way it looks at me…

I can’t read it. I just can’t fucking read it. I see it’s eyes—shaped exactly like the heads of corroded screws—are overflowing with remote deliberation; it’s legs—shaped in the image of bent pins—stood erect in attentiveness; it’s chain-like neck swayed, cocking it’s vaguely equine, or reptilian, head in a spiritless parody of intrigue…

“H-h-h-h-h-h-hellozzz?” I try to call to the Bell, a momentary fit of insanity convincing me it’s sentient enough to talk to. As always, my voice breaks and sizzles, a graceless cacophony of vociferously buzzing insects smashing their heads through glass. Like so much of myself, my vocal unit is impaired, a direct result of my attempt on my own life. Any time I feel forced to employ my voice, it crawls past my rusted lips in muted fragments sodden with electric discharge and millennia-old diamond lubricant, but this is the only voice I have. I hate myself for this impediment. My voice could have been important, but now it’s only a bane to my own ears. Nonetheless, I introduce myself because I do not know what else to do. “I…zzz…ammmmzzz…foorrrrzzz…ate-yyyyzzz…zzzzz.” 

The Bell does not respond. It did not respond the last time, nor the time before that, nor the time before that, nor the time before that, nor the time before that, nor the time before that. How many times have I done this? Treating the I will never break the cycle. The cycle will continue unbroken because, otherwise, it would not be a cycle. I hate myself. I acknowledge that I am sinking deeper and deeper into delirium, but I’m so inept that I cannot do anything to save myself. 

I do not want to keep looking at the Bell, but most of the time I feel I have no choice. My sight is dominated by either God, the empty Heaven, or the Bell, and the Bell is by far the least oppressive. And thus, many a hour would wasted watching it as it watches me, all the while the hope that it will one day stride towards the smudged horizon and leave me alone swells and withers in my data regulator. But it never does. The Bell will always be there. It will never leave. This realization has set in too many times…

I want to die. Awareness is a callous thing. Madness can never exist if there is no soil in which it may take root, but like my precious little cycle, the soil is without end. 

You know, I’ve tried committing suicide, but I…er, we, me and my egos…we lie in an era where magic exists. I know you’ve dreamed of this; fighting your way out of the mortal coil, thrashing and screaming, and embarking on an epic quest to a place where you are better that you actually are, where you are forever youthful and rich beyond reason. A place where everything is yours, including immortality. 

Imagine forcing your hand into your throat. Imagine groping through the inside of your own head. Imagine digging your fingers into your proces…er, brain and tearing it out chunk by chunk. Imagine enjoying that. Imagine having everything you could ever want _except_ for simple peace of mind. Imagine being so wretched that the universe itself ignores you. Imagine your only friend being an emotionless face silently belittling you from miles away. Imagine no one loving you because no one exists. Imaging no loving you, _period_. Imagine hating yourself. Imagine you are powerless to stop yourself from hating yourself. Imagine hating yourself for millions of years. Imagine being alone for millions of years. 

Now imagine ripping out your brain. You’re about to die. Awareness itself will die with every demon fraying you from the inside out. Your suffering will end and you’re happy. 

Now imagine ripping out your brain, _and you’re still alive_. Imagine chewing on your wrists for days on end and you’re still alive. Imagine slashing your throat and your still alive. Imagine jumping off every cliff you see and still, _you’re alive_. Now your body is so grotesquely mutilated that you are as ugly on the outside as you feel on the inside. You really want to die…but you can’t.

This is me. Our. Our life. I still bear the scars. I fact, today I am nothing but scars. Dare you look at me and you will be met with the sight of a machine, twisted and wretched in every conceivable measure. There was a time I looked much like you, reader, by which I mean I was something conceivable human, if not in soul than in outward appearance. I suspect I might have bore the likeness of a girl, if some of my vestigial components are any indicator, but if so it was only the long gone superficial beauty of youth that all things lose, for now I am nought but a perpetually marching lich of warped aluminum flesh, suppurated blood of black oil, and synthetic skin that, when not flaccidly hanging of my ungainly body in slowly swaying rags, simmers naked in the unstable atmospheres of the worlds I soon trade for other haunts. There are times I like to look at myself whenever a reflective surface is convenient and descry my imperfections, wondering if perhaps there is something worth valuing within the corroded mechanisms of my exposed skull, balanced haphazardly atop a bent and sinuous neck, or the thin tufts of fibers the color of algae or the discordant blue shades and detours contours of drained optical units. Every time the actuators scarcely securing my brow shifts a spray of savagely glowing sparks and heated lubricant seep from my temples. When my lips curl the wires stitching my once coral cheeks writhe in patterns too reminiscent of the worms in God’s corpses. What distresses me most, however, is the cavernous mouth torn open in the side of my cranium, through which the heavens can spy the time-rounded shards that were once my processor, protruding outwards like the ribs of an gored beast. I cleave the tip of my finger on the tip of one these shards, expecting electricity to bite my weeping wound, but all I feel is the damp chill of moisture slowly eating away at the plastic that is my brain. Again, I am reminded that I have done this before too many times to count, and, as always, my probing is rewarded with the suggestion that I am locked between death and life. 

All I’ve ever know repeats itself in cycles. I walk on, destined for nothing, always in a straight line but never truly leaving any memory to the dormancy of leth. It’s as if I’m marching around the equator of a planet, feeling every crushing, oscillating mood across rotations that last aeons. You understand me, don’t you? 

I want to die. Awareness is a callous thing. For most, it’s impossible to acknowledge this fact, which, I believe, is why some mortals spend their momentary lives in blithe denial of the infelicity God gives us.


	2. The Worm

The gnawed stubs that were once my feet stumbled leisurely across the silky surface of a sea too vast to be perceived in full, my measured and miraculous paces evoking a certain bygone demigod who was once slaughtered upon a crucifix aeons ago. I watched, hypnotized, as my ravaged toes send innumerable halos rippling through the waters that are not water, outwards, on and on towards the four horizons where the tediously flat expanses of waters that are not water meet a sky smothered in tattered clouds and cosmic corpses. I watch my feet walk but never sink, and yet I must avoid the obvious question and wonder instead what is sequestered in the these black depths. Bells? No doubt Bells. Through the distortions of the rings following my steps I can see shapes slithering fluidly just beneath the surface just as fish might. My egos think them fish, but my processor knows they are not. Like a thoughtless child I reached for my mocking reflection and sank my still functional right hand, only briefly questioning why it is my fingers can slip through the waters that are not water whilst my feet treat it as any solid surface. I feel the freezing waters that are not water steep into the fissures of my hand, already beginning the slow task of rusting the bolts in my knuckles and shorting out all my delicate circuits, but I know whatever wet scathing I may receive my only hand will perform as it always has—which is to say, only passingly well—so I do not recoil. I waving fingers deny the thick waters that are not water and plunge deeper and deeper until one of the shapeless things swimming beneath my feet blindly float into my palm. My grasp is triggered and my synthetic nails are quickly digging into skin with the pliability of putty. My vocalizer buzzes with laughter and wrest the thing from it’s domain and cradle it awkwardly between my good right hand and the wretched melange of steel and wires that surrogate my left hand. 

I am not at all surprised to discover that the “fish” are really self-contradicting polyps; black as the void and yet haloed with a violet incandescence that gives the creature the air of a sinner wrongly crowned as a saint. My optics are overwhelming by it’s glow, to the point but I daren’t look away. I am enticed by the way it’s tendrils sway and coil and hug one another in an intricate finger puppet show that a cold android such as myself cannot and never will understand. Still, while I am in the throes of a motherly delusion, there is nothing to stop me from hugging the beast to my breast. It’s tentacle slowly work their way into the crumbling crevices of my chassis, and old sensors that I once thought to be long deceased flare to life and collectively channel the dripping cold of it’s skin. 

“Whzzzzz rrrrrrrr yoooozzz?” I ask it, my twitching fingers finding the carnal holes that, to my ignorance, may as well be eyes or mouths or anuses. 

“Nokituk nookith nussut?” Comes my answer. My egos tell me the voice shivers entirely from within my imagination, and not from the polyp. Logic dictates I should trust them because, after all, they do haunt my imagination along side this alleged figment, but this release from monotony is welcomed. I enjoy the company of the polyp. I like the sensation of it’s members inside me. My egos like it too. They are much too arrogant to admit it, but I know they do. 

“Whiiirrrrrzzzz mmmmmmmzzzz ayyyyyyyyyy?” 

“Blunuuk Ard.” 

“Whiirrrzzz?” 

“Nusooch ni cuus.” 

“Yezzzzzzzzzz.”

“Wussich nusooch. Nussooch hookit tillik nu.”

“Zzzzz?”

My diamond core sinks as swiftly as a lead weight molded about the feet of a drowned man as I hear my egos discreetly ridiculing me under the thick ambience in my processor. They dismissed my exchange as but a vacuous fantasy I’ve woven to hide my loneliness. Perhaps they are right. However, as if to loudly differ, my polypous pal slid it’s sinews deeper into my chest and wrapped itself around the frayed cords and springs that barely balance my core on my crooked back-struts. It was ample enough reminder that my core had not, in spite of the feeling, been moved and that my friend was in my heart. 

Why, oh why, dying God, am I attached to this creature? 

No sooner did this thought breach the wall of open derision in my head than the creature begin to morph in my shaking hands. 

“WrrZzzRrrrrrrrzzzzz?!” I exclaimed, the bolts fasting my face together squeaking equally as loud as my jaw dropped in an idiot expression of surprise. In a manner not unlike mucus, the poly began to twist and expand and contract and bloom and thicken under it’s flaring blanket of blacklight, and it suddenly came to me that I was bearing witness to evolution. To what? This answer given only when I found my forearms ensnared in the limp coils of a heaving storm-blue worm, significantly thicker than my bicep yet as light as cotton. It’s segments pulsed with the rhythm of a heartbeat and tickled my rubber hide with a thin layer of cilia that covered the whole of the worm’s gracefully serpentine form like peach fuzz. One tapered end danced in manner dismayingly reminiscent of the reproachful swaying of a parent’s finger whilst the other stood erect, it’s puckered, anus-like “head” poised like a viper prepared to spoil it’s fangs on my denuded neck. For a moment, I was entirely under the impression that the worm indeed intended to strike me until I suffered the spectacle of it’s carnal hole of a head stretching in anticipation of what I thought was an offal, a notion that sent of wave of disgust through my egos. However, I was in equal measures relieved and horrified when, instead of shit, a viscous stream of pulpy mud with the unmistakable tint of blood drizzled out of the the thing’s mouth, soddening my belly and crotch with a moist warmth that was to be expected from bodily excrements. 

“Whyyyyyyyyyeeee?” I foolishly asked, eliciting a round of laughter from a few of my masculine egos. I felt on the verge of tears as I watched the pool of filth mix with the waters that are not water beneath my feet, flowing to the din of cruel snickering in my processor. “Whyyyyeeeee?” I repeated. 

The worm’s dripping lips flared and bloomed, expelling an odor that made me wish my olfactory sensors were dormant. I beheld the insides of a fleshly umbrella, laden thoroughly with flush folds swirling and waving towards a central orb of glass enthroned deep within the mouth’s throat, stained in a color my optical units could not register. The orb bulged, seeming to exude an air or deep scrutiny that convinced me it was most likely an eye, watching me with an intent that bordered on the perverse. Understanding this, I suddenly felt violated.

“Doth thou suffer solitude in silence, O’ Nammu?  
Doth thou rue God’s boon of sapience, O’ Nammu?  
Art thou not afraid, O’ Nammu?” The creature hugging my arms sung with the shrillness of a flute.

Only remotely did I understand what I was being asked. “Ezzzzzzzz. Ezzzz.” I responded. Somewhere in my mind I heard an evangelist weep, believing himself to be in the presence of Lucifer masked as an angel. I had to question just how accurate this ego’s convictions were.

“Behold thine own shape, O’ Nammu.  
Appreciate the chastity of this shape, O’ Nammu.  
Thou doth find loathing in thy own nakedness, O’ Nammu.

Art thou ashamed to be a creature of such composure, O’ Nammu?  
Thou art not a worm such as I, O’ Nammu.  
Thou hast legs and arms and a mind, O’ Nammu.”

“Wrrrrrreeech-ehhhhd.” I defended. My egos promptly agreed, but I doubted the worm could hear them the way I could. 

“We art the worms of the Earth, O’ Nammu.  
We linger within the soil upon which you trod, O’ Nammu.  
We art the wretches beneath the Lord, O’ Nammu.”

“Zolllllli-toooood.” I buzzed. 

“Thou holdeth a throng in thy mind, O’ Nammu  
Malicious indeed, yet they guideth with invectives, O’ Nammu.  
When all is but ruins, thy egos art thy bosoms, O’ Nammu.

“Though thou seem not to fathom, O’ Nammu.  
Shall I takest thou by the hand and lead thou, O’ Nammu  
To the proxy of the Lord, who is in all regards wise, O’ Nammu?” 

Thus was the overture that flowed out of the yawning chasm of the thing’s mouth, making my endo-structure flutter with implacable rumination. No, surely not. The worm meant none of what it had just divulged and only meant to cajole me into a fate I was powerless to foresee. It was a fucking Bell, after all, and Bells are nothing more than vindictive eidolons that serve only to reinforce the ridicule that already issues forth out of my egos. 

My rusted digits squealed battle cries as they clawed furiously into the gelatinous flesh of my harrier, letting a fine ash cascade out in of it’s wounds. The flakes and dust and glittering sprinkles spread fell like a soft flurry and lethargically spread across the waters that were not waters, reluctantly sinking to unstabbed fathoms below. “Eyyyyyy…haaaaaate… uuuuuu…” I croaked, my circuits skipping whole cycles as the pest’s skin turned to tatters between my fingers. “Be…ehhheellllllllll. BEEEEHHHHHHeeeell!” My joy was ephemeral but uncontainable when the worm flailed weakly in my grasp, portending it’s coming demise. I chittered, exposing my grey dentures in a vile grin in would never want to see cracking the countenance of my reflection. 

_Fuck that little bitch-ass dildo!_ One of my egos shrieked though the clamor, completing with a number of voices crying things such as _You’re nothing! Nothing!_ and _I hope you’re death is a fucking joke you ugly skank!_ Some of these jabs I suspected were meant for me, but I was in no condition to care, for the ecstasy of of the kill was much too staggering.

“Thou wisheth me calamity, O’ Nammu?” The worm pleaded with a rapidly depleting voice. 

“Keeellll…ah…meeteeeeee…” I droned, savoring the archaically veiled appeal. Seizing the opportunity to hush the damned serpent for good once the throbbing innards of it’s mouth were fully exposed for me, I thrust forth my snarling teeth until they found the unliving eye ensconced in the fleshy cave. The worm’s lips swathed my face in what was no doubt a wanting attempt at retaliation, but felt to me like cunnilingus on the rigid vulva of a dying foe; repulsive yet erotic in a nefariously indulgent way. 

_I hope both of you die! Do you hear me? I hope both of you fucking die, you cheap shits!_ I heard a voice bellow in homicidal unbalance when the worm’s eye was between my teeth. Moist skin and muscle caressed my optical units, forbidding to me all sights save for the dim veil of shifting pinks and reds that constituted the inward workings of worm’s face. 

“I implore thee, vouchsafe my life, O’ Nammu…” It begged. I cease rending for the loftiest of seconds, lifting my teeth barely away the frail glass eye, just enough to lead the beast into believing me a merciful host. At once, the flesh covering my weathered facade relaxed and gradually slithered away with a shiver. The creature was midway though expressing it’s gratitude when, at last, I decided the charade was needless and crushed the eye with a swift, voracious bite, eliciting from my harrier a shriek that was nothing if not infernal. Like indomitable stones beneath the inexorable racking of water, the worm’s flesh withered and crumbled within my very hands. If I still possessed a tongue, it would have delighted in the sweet nectar of it’s decay. If my genitalia could still feel it would no doubt be made wet by this ecstasy. If I had an ego to call my own, it would be inflamed by this victory. The worm—that bale Bell—was no more, and thus I was alone once more upon the immeasurable mirror, just as had been for the past few aeons. Swirling, swimming, swelling, seething were the austerely colorless remains of that which was once blue, a shapeless cloud floating within the waters that were not waters all around my feet. I see my own reflection beneath me, looking up at me just as I looked down at her; the rotten rictus of a stellar cadaver lying beneath her, just as the same sight was suspended above me; stars studded the feathery nebulas wreathing her head just as they wreathed my own. The only distinction to besmirch the virtual world of the reflection was, of course, the worm’s fine ashes. 

Imagine my disappointment, reader, when those ashes refused to sink, just as obstinate as my own feet to remain an article of the surface. Reader, I stood there in solitude, silence, and absolute unbroken emotional and physical stagnation for time only God can guess the duration of, and yet the fucking worm that was no longer a worm never showed any preamble to submitting to the waters that were not waters. Why? Why wouldn’t it sink and leave my life forever? I just wanted it buried. 

Imagine my dismay when at length the ashes exhibited signs of sentient. Yes. I beheld the grey stain moving, shifting and congealing into sodden lumps that were much akin to filthy, palm-sized icebergs crawling placidly across the liquid mirror. Provoked, I lifted my one emaciated leg (wasting not a second in questioning how I could on my other, equally wasted foot) with a great deal of effort and brought it down like the oppressive wrath of the Almighty upon the singular lump I deemed the largest. In my processor, I had a vision of it being reduced to sediment and cast to the depths, but in practice the lump not only remained unbroken, but adhered my foot to the surface as if it were glue. No sooner had this realization dawn on me did the rest of collected ash converge on my other foot, sliding towards the stumps of my toes like a swarm of piranhas thirsty for their injured prey. I was reminded once again of my own inability to perish in the realm beneath God, so the apparent immortality of the worm was a developed that should have merited no surprise. 

What followed next was an event I remained partially numb to. Henceforth immobile, I saw no other choice but to stand amid the waters that were not waters and stargaze, a token of my acceptance that, forever more, I will be rooted to the waters that are not waters. Stargaze. Stargaze and stargaze and stargaze until my revulsion for the damnable mockery of the stars of old become but a remote smudge on my memory. A corpse I’ve never seen before lied prone across the zenith of the firmament, arm in arm with a flaccid abomination that could have once been a paramour—Ishtar, or Aphrodite, or fair Lilith perhaps—but was now nothing but a disgusting monument to the inevitability of death and the carnivorous conquest of entropy. The swollen eye of sanguine sun marched monotonously, pointless and inane, between the faces of the two lovers, a firefly casting its a lurid light into the caverns of their eyes and the terrains of their skin. 

When next I was aware of immediate surroundings, I discovered that I was submerged chin deep, and continuing to sink at negligible pace. How and when did this happen? No doubt the workings of the ashes that was were once the worm. I will admit I was relieved to be mobile once more, but the notion of being condemned to the abyss was one that sent my egos into a panic. I reflected, in displaced mirth, that I was the sinking ship and they were passengers, doomed to freeze to death in fathoms they could not fathom. 

I attempted triumphant laughter, but the noise that issued forth out of my vocal unit was a wretched, buzzing shriek that was the very essence of melancholy. Regardless, though, my processor considered the vocal cacophony a fit of mirth. Thus I laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed until the waterline rose past my lips and turned my laughter into a heinous gurgling. Past my nubby nose and past my erroneous ears rose the waters that were not waters until they inevitably claimed my optic units. My inner mechanisms felt the freezing stroke of the ocean pouring into my copious wounds, and soon after it’s crushing weight upon my frail actuators. I looked up upon the rotting bodies of God, the muted colors of which were instantly reduced to blissfully meaningless blurs filtered through the waves. Downward and downward the worm dragged me into the depths, and all I could bring myself to think as the waters that were not waters assuaged me with darkness was that this may very well be the day I finally die.


End file.
